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jaydub

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SATA 3 transfer rate is 600MB/s. A single WD Black 6TB HDD benchmarks in HDTune at about 200MB/s at the beginning of the drive. A SATA SSD almost saturates SATA 3. However, Gigabit LAN connection is only 125MB/s. Isn't a Gigabit LAN connection in a NAS setup a major bottleneck?

I'm a newbie, but I thought a NAS setup was generally attached to a network (hence network attached storage) , which would be dependent on a router, which is dependent on a Gigabit LAN connection. If this is true, then a big old raid setup in a NAS would be severely limited in speed, with Gigabit LAN being the weak link. Am I missing something...are my figures wrong?
 
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Am I missing something...are my figures wrong?
thats why you gee a nas that supports link aggregation and a switch or router that also supports it and then you have twice the speed , something is always going to be the bottleneck and if 113 MB/s throughput isnt fast enough there are ways around it
 
thats why you gee a nas that supports link aggregation and a switch or router that also supports it and then you have twice the speed , something is always going to be the bottleneck and if 113 MB/s throughput isnt fast enough there are ways around it

But a single client, unless the client aggregates two ports (not common) will still see the same transfer rate..

Slowest link always wins in the throughput race...
 
But a single client, unless the client aggregates two ports (not common) will still see the same transfer rate..
agreed but then 2 clients can download at 113 MB/s or there abouts meaning the nas is not so much the bottleneck but the client ethernet is
 
agreed but then 2 clients can download at 113 MB/s or there abouts meaning the nas is not so much the bottleneck but the client ethernet is

I can take two i7 based machines and transfer as fast as they can possibly do, and still not saturate a 1GB link from the NAS - 120MB/s each..

2 1GB links LAG'ed is not twice as fast, there's overhead on the LAG'ed leg, and generally the transfer rate to the client is exactly the same as it would be otherwise..

1st hand experience with LAG - blade center chassis that was constrained on a single 10GB link - 40GB was available, but a substantial upgrade cost, whereas we had plenty of 10GB SFP connectors and ports - we eventually bit the bullet and went with the 40GB SFP upgrade, because 4*10GB doesn't even come close...

Gotta love carrier grade data centers :D
 
2 1GB links LAG'ed is not twice as fast, there's overhead on the LAG'ed leg, and generally the transfer rate to the client is exactly the same as it would be otherwise..

sorry mate but i will contest you on this and ask you to prove your claim as although i did say it wouldnt be double , i can say its well past the same speed as not LAG'ed
 
SATA 3 transfer rate is 600MB/s. A single WD Black 6TB HDD benchmarks in HDTune at about 200MB/s at the beginning of the drive. A SATA SSD almost saturates SATA 3. However, Gigabit LAN connection is only 125MB/s. Isn't a Gigabit LAN connection in a NAS setup a major bottleneck?

I'm a newbie, but I thought a NAS setup was generally attached to a network (hence network attached storage) , which would be dependent on a router, which is dependent on a Gigabit LAN connection. If this is true, then a big old raid setup in a NAS would be severely limited in speed, with Gigabit LAN being the weak link. Am I missing something...are my figures wrong?

My view

Primary bottleneck is software overhead: file system in NAS, file system in PC/Mac; then the common SMB to make different file systems inter-operate; then the file create/delete overhead in any file system (say 60-100 files per second for small files which are most common); the the LAN speed including TCP stack overhead.

So SATA speeds don't do much except for intra-NAS speeds if you use 2+ volumes rather than all-RAID.
 
No regular spinning disks transfer at 600MB/s, actually unless you are working with large files you'll be lucky to saturate a gigabit network. It's one thing to say that you can reach 200MB/s at the beginning of a disk using a synthetic measurement tool, and another thing to copy a random directory full of pics and thumbnails.

But yeah, the network definately is a bottleneck these days, even on cheaper NAS devices. With my newer fast NAS I get pretty close to saturating the gigabit network even with pictures (and I'm using 2.5" 5400rpm drives). But something will always be the bottleneck, if it's ethernet then the problem isn't on the NAS side. :)
 

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